Within This City
by Red-Ink-Cliche
Summary: It was a city of rain and filth, and those trapped inside are seldom allowed to escape.  Prohibition has been enacted, and Axel, despondent and broken, finds himself in a bootlegging ring, and yet he can only dream of sunlight. AkuRoku


"_Within This City" _

_Prologue—Illusions of Sunlight_

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><p><strong><em>Warnings:<em>**_ I like tragedies, and this fic will certainly have its tragic moments, as well as __blood, swearing, underage drinking, and semi-tasteful yaoi lemon(s). Also AU, if you don't like that._

_**Summary: **It was a city of rain and filth, and those trapped inside are seldom allowed to escape. Prohibition has been enacted, and Axel, despondent and broken, finds himself in a bootlegging ring, and yet he can only dream of sunlight.  
><em>

_A/N I'm one of those people who always has to have music playing in the background to feel sane, no matter where I am, so here's some musical selections to listen to that I believe fit this chapter fairly well :] Just plug the names into Youtube and enjoy! Bonus if you go to Rainymood (dot) com and play it behind the music ;]_

"_Shattered" – Trading Yesterday _

"_Mocking Bird" – Eminem _

"_Repose" – Square Enix Music, NieR Gestalt and NeiR Replicant Soundtrack_

"_God's Will" – Yasuharu Takanashi, Naruto Soundtrack_

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><p>It was a dark, sordid day. The whole world seemed to be raining its each and every sorrow down on that one little city in a torrent of gray gloom.<p>

The deluge was relentless. The drains that had never been cleaned were overflowing with muck and black leaves and dirty water, filling the streets with the hodgepodge slug. Slanted, tin roofs were creating a racket that vied even with the thunder, while the lighting that spread across the black clouds like the creeping limbs of dead trees reflected in the streaked glass windows of the looming houses. Though even to call them "houses" was generous.

The building themselves in this little city of sorrow and filth were no more than gravestones, marking the dead dreams and lost hopes of the generations that dwelled within their grey brick walls—generations that were trapped where they were like miniature robins in rusting cages or mangled weeds growing between the cracks of the sidewalk outside their paint-bare front doors.

It was a place where no one could tell the difference between reality and their memories, where the day they lived in and the days to come all ran together in a blurred disarray of plain, repetitive sights and white noise.

Axel had lived in this world all his life—though just how long that life had been he didn't even know. When someone asked, he'd say he was "twenty-two" sometimes and "twenty-six" others. It was all a matter of how old he wanted to feel that day. For all he knew, he might have been eighteen, but he fervently convinced himself he had to be at least twenty-one—he liked to drink just too much to be a day less, though he knew had been drinking for well over six years.

In his younger days he had been shipped and tossed from foster home to foster home until at the ripe old age of eleven and a half he managed to run away and stay away. That was when he met Demyx and Xigbar, and eventually Xemnas. But every now and then, on a rainy day, he might recognize an old lady on the street corner as one of the "mothers" who had once had hope in him, who once tried to steer him down a better path that just might have led him out of this sordid little city—but they never recognized him.

He would offer them his umbrella, then walk away. He had lost more umbrellas than he knew what to do with that way.

Sardonically, he would poke fun at himself and try to say he was just using it as a way to "fuel the economy," because he would end up having to go buy a new umbrella not a day later, as it rained so much in this little city. Or sometimes, when he just didn't have the spare cash for something so luxurious, Xigbar might go out of his way and buy one for him.

He never said thank you, but Xigbar never expected him to.

And on this day, the city was no different. The rain was hard and the streets were soggy and the people were listless. Axel himself was just as listless, emerald eyes smothered in gray sorrow, and damp red hair a disheveled mess of thin twists and tight plaits, half pulled into one thick, kinky braid down his neck, stray sodden tendrils clinging to his forehead like leaches.

Today was one of those days he didn't have an umbrella, but he moved with no urgency or haste as he ambled down the semi-empty, semi-crowded street. When it was this wet and depressing everywhere, where was there to hurry to? He at least felt a little freer outside in the rain than he did within the gray buildings. They were like cages, he had decided long ago, looming cages of iron and stone—no better than prisons, and as far as he was concerned, especially with his "line of work," he wanted to stay as far away from prisons as possible.

For a moment, he forgot where he was going, but just kept walking anyway. Everything was so dull, was so lifeless and brooding. He'd give anything for something new to happen, and for half a second found himself praying to a God he didn't believe in for something he didn't know what.

He shook his head, rattling his brain, then continued walking, remembering just what is was that he was supposed to be doing. Casually shifting his hand to the inside pocket of his oversized, faded green trench coat, he felt for the soggy piece of folded paper and his revolver.

Both were still there, the paper cradling the muzzle of the steel weapon like a mother's dainty hand.

He walked by a little tourist shop—which he found more than ironic all on its own—and lowered his hand as he passed the hat rack perched by the door. He walked a few more paces before placing his new taupe fedora atop his head. The stitching was loose and the fabric was flimsy, but so was everything else made in this little city. Everyone knew that, and everyone accepted it. There was no reason to fuss, really, when the people were just as loose and flimsy themselves.

He was almost to his assigned address—an old apartment building, top floor, room number 402, on the edge of town. Its location was written on the soggy piece of flaxen paper enveloped in his pocket along with the revolver, but he already had it memorized. No use looking like an idiot in this sort of situation.

The apartment complex was within sight, the rain streaming off his flimsy hat and onto his shoulders and pale cheeks. Considering his latest job, he thought he should have been more on edge at the moment. But his hands were calm and his heartbeat steady.

With a sigh he remembered he was always like this—as was everyone else in this little city. Nothing made him shudder, made his palms sweat, made him _passionate_. Even death held no grip on him. Death was just an ends to a means, something they would all come to see one day—no use fearing it. Lord knows he's even had friends die in his arms, blood swept away by the pouring rain and eyes somehow turning even more listless and lifeless than they were before. As sad as he was that day, that day Luxord left this little city through the stifling rain in his very arms, he still was not _passionate_ about it.

But that allowed him to fit in so well with this little city. He was just as broken as everyone else in it, it seemed.

He continued walking in his indolent amble down the street, gloom heavy in the smog-laden air around him as his mind ran dull circles around his skull, trying to occupy itself until a time when it would be needed.

He had just broached upon the idea that it was probably time to go pay his respects to Luxord's grave—not like there was even a body in that empty hill anyway—when something caught his eyes.

And he stopped near dead in his tracks.

He was facing a pet shop, of all things, across the street, a passing gas-sputtering car interrupting his vision only momentarily. Open gilded cages with colorful little finches inside them stood at the doorway—the birds beautiful little splashes of color amidst the gray walls, like vigilante graffiti or a knocked over flower cart.

But the bright, fluttering birds were not what caught his eye. Nor was it the warm, tender light spilling out the wall-high windows, or the fluffy, mop of a pup rolling at the wheeled bases of the birdcages, or even the sweet smell of the violets and trumpet-shaped amaryllises that sat in rectangular, wood boxes on either side of the door.

No, instead it was the simple looking boy tending those already pristine white cages.

He was young and small—probably just barely sixteen—a petite body moving underneath an apron and a casual shirt and faded blue jeans. In that sense he looked perfectly normal, but Axel saw something else in the way the boy moved, the way the boy even breathed. He held such a living warmth within his every little motion that Axel thought he might melt right there on the sidewalk and be washed away down the cobblestone street by the rain. And for a moment he was just fine with that.

The boy moved with such an inviting grace, deliberate and genuine and downright free, just like those bright birds in their open cages. For a moment, he wondered why both the boy and the birds stayed in this squalid little city—Lord knew they both had wings.

Slender, pale hands filled miniature water troughs clipped to the bars of a white cage, the little green finch within fluttering and singing, and the boy's glowing face singing with it in a silent harmony. Wild, golden hair shifted atop his head—an illusion of shimmering sunlight and summer.

The boy suddenly stepped towards the door, pushing it open as he approached, the corner of the door striking a little bell with a distinct _clink-a-tink_.

Axel ducked into a nearby alley, his body giving something close to a momentary shudder, yet he kept watching from within the wet shadows of the walls around him, almost afraid that some being far mightier than he or anyone else might just reach a divine hand down and claim that beautiful life as His own the moment he looked away.

Yet nothing of the sort happened as the boy took a step outside the door, and even in the rain, he looked like pure sunlight. The boy's eyes watched the passing cars a brief moment, then turned skyward, and Axel caught a striking glimpse of iridescent blue irises brighter than the sky behind a rainbow, something he had only seen a few times in this city.

It was such an odd sight—seeing something so alive—and Axel knew not what to make of it. For a moment, he near lost himself completely right there on the cracked sidewalk, and he once again found himself praying to a God he didn't believe in, but this time he knew exactly what for: to somehow, someway, just for a fleeting instant in his who-know-how-long-life, grasp that beautiful embodiment of sunlight and blues skies within his own pale, gray hands.


End file.
